[Lingtyp] Greenbergian word order universals: confirmed after all

[Martin Haspelmath]

Dear all,

Twelve years ago, for the first (and so far last) time, typology made it 
into /Nature/, and /BBC Online/ reported at the time: “A long-standing 
idea that human languages share universal features that are dictated by 
human brain structure has been cast into doubt.” 
(https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-13049700). Our journal 
/Linguistic Typology/ took this as an opportunity to publish a 
“Universals Debate” taking up 200 pages 
(https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/lity.2011.023/html). 
Younger LINGTYP readers may not remember all this, but a lot of stir was 
caused at the time by the paper by Dunn et al. (2011), which claimed 
that "systematic linkages of traits are likely to be the rare exception 
rather than the rule. Linguistic diversity does not seem to be tightly 
constrained by universal cognitive factors“ 
(https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09923). Their paper argued not 
only against Chomskyan UG (universal grammar), but also against the 
Greenbergian word order universals (Dryer 1992).

In the meantime, however, it has become clear that those surprising 
claims about word order universals are not supported – the sample size 
(four language families) used in their paper was much too small.

Much less prominently, Jäger & Wahle (2021) reexamined those claims 
(using similar methods, but many more language families and all relevant 
/WALS/ data), finding “statistical evidence for 13 word order features, 
which largely confirm the findings of traditional typological research” 
(https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.682132/full).

Similarly, Annemarie Verkerk and colleagues (including Russell Gray) 
have recently reexamined a substantial number of claimed universals on 
the basis of the much larger Grambank database and found that especially 
Greenberg’s word order universals hold up quite well (see Verkerk’s talk 
at the recent Grambank workshop at MPI-EVA: 
https://www.eva.mpg.de/de/linguistic-and-cultural-evolution/events/2023-grambank-workshop/, 
available on YouTube: 
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSqqgRcaL9yl8FNW_wb8tDIzz9R78t8Uk).

So what went wrong in 2011? We are used to paying a lot of attention to 
the “big journals” (/Nature, Science, PNAS, Cell/), but they often focus 
on sensationalist claims, and they typically publish less reliable 
results than average journals (see Brembs 2018: 
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00037/full).

So maybe we should be extra skeptical when a paper is published in a 
high-prestige journal. But another question that I have is: Why didn’t 
the authors see that their 2011 results were unlikely to be true, and 
that their sample size was much too small? Why didn't they notice that 
most of the word order changes in their four families were 
contact-induced? Were they so convinced that their new mathematical 
method (adopted from computational biology) would yield correct results 
that they neglected to pay sufficient attention to the data? Would it 
have helped if they had submitted their paper to a linguistics journal?

Perhaps I’m too pessimistic (see also this blogpost: 
https://dlc.hypotheses.org/2368), but in any event, I think that this 
intriguing episode (and sobering experience) should be discussed among 
typologists, and we should learn from it, in one way or another. 
Advanced quantitative methods are now everywhere in science, and it 
seems that they are often misapplied or misunderstood (see also this 
recent blogpost by Richard McElreath: 
https://elevanth.org/blog/2023/06/13/science-and-the-dumpster-fire/).

Martin

-- 
Martin Haspelmath
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6
D-04103 Leipzig
https://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistic-and-cultural-evolution/staff/martin-haspelmath/
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